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Posted

It seems like many in Austin aren’t aware of the school consolidation plan that will announced Oct 3rd and voted on, on the 9th. A dozen or more elementary and middle schools will close and all attendance boundaries will be redrawn. AISD said in the Zoom call yesterday that every school will be affected and the boundary changes will be severe. They will also most likely eliminate transfers to force kids to attend their home schools.

TEA also moved the goal posts and just said AISD must develop improvement plans for 33 schools instead of the original dozen. The plans are still due in November. This is to assure the inevitable state takeover of the district.

TLDR: AISD is fucked.

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Posted
27 minutes ago, CooterBrown said:

It seems like many in Austin aren’t aware of the school consolidation plan that will announced Oct 3rd and voted on, on the 9th. A dozen or more elementary and middle schools will close and all attendance boundaries will be redrawn. AISD said in the Zoom call yesterday that every school will be affected and the boundary changes will be severe. They will also most likely eliminate transfers to force kids to attend their home schools.

TEA also moved the goal posts and just said AISD must develop improvement plans for 33 schools instead of the original dozen. The plans are still due in November. This is to assure the inevitable state takeover of the district.

TLDR: AISD is fucked.

I agree that AISD is fucked. Only way out is fixing recapture and that isn’t going to happen anytime soon. They are being set up for a state takeover and that will speed up the decline in enrollment, especially at the higher end schools that can take advantage of vouchers. The lower end will continue to get whittled away by charters. 

 I feel the district has been dealt the most unfair hand of any district in the state. However, that does not absolve the district of terrible leadership over the last 10 years. Cruz had no idea how to put large scale systems in place. Elizalde was the nail in the coffin by running off most of the competent, long-term staff then bouncing to Dallas. They had to hire a home grown guy just to try to salvage what staff was left.

They are good at hiring west Austin principals who work with their involved communities. No clue how to run the other 2/3rds of schools. 

Not really my main focus with work right now but my company does own, manage and operate charters in other states. Would be hilariously ironic to come back to AISD to run 20 of their schools as charters and give no fucks about what their clown show administration wants. 

Posted

The classroom library approval thing is at least a year old.

I know all of our English teachers had to scan every book in their classroom library, the ISBN info, not the entire book obviously.

Any books not on approved lists set by the district were removed.

It also applied to Science and History as well. Anyone that had any books available for students to use had to put them in the database or remove them

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Posted

Strong rumor going around that Wooten Elementary will close and merge with Brentwood which puts that school over capacity.

I'm gonna guess our home elementary, Gullett, is gonna get fucked and merged with Pillow.

From the Zoom call, it sounds like the Beckett Elementary community already knows they're also closing.  

Posted
On 9/14/2025 at 6:39 PM, TwiceHorn said:

To fire a public employee for expression that is unrelated to work, there still has to be some nexus to the work environment, meaning the effect of the speech in question has to make the job harder for others in some way or otherwise adversely affect the work environment.

So, the firing authorities will have to turn it into something work related in a pretextual fashion.  "Reprehensible and irresponsible" is a rather poor job of framing it that way ahead of time.

At least that's the way it was under oldlaw, and oldlaw was mostly made by reactionaries in this case, but not these particular reactionaries.

Of course, the current reactionaries aren't very good with oldlaw, but they're also getting mulligans from SCOTUS, so  . . . . .

Teachers have a right to their personal opinions but they should exercise caution when posting anything online. Districts have often been ruled by a small minority of parents/citizen who clutch their pearls at anything.

We're not that far removed when a divorced, female teacher would be run out of a small town for being a disgrace and setting a bad example for the girls. Much less if they're posting opinions online that some in the community would disagree. I imagine there are busybodies in school districts that follow as many teachers as possible in an attempt to catch them posting anything scandalous, including going back in the teacher's history of social posts. Their goal is to find anything that would allow them to kick out a teacher. 

Posted
15 hours ago, CooterBrown said:

It seems like many in Austin aren’t aware of the school consolidation plan that will announced Oct 3rd and voted on, on the 9th. A dozen or more elementary and middle schools will close and all attendance boundaries will be redrawn. AISD said in the Zoom call yesterday that every school will be affected and the boundary changes will be severe. They will also most likely eliminate transfers to force kids to attend their home schools.

TEA also moved the goal posts and just said AISD must develop improvement plans for 33 schools instead of the original dozen. The plans are still due in November. This is to assure the inevitable state takeover of the district.

TLDR: AISD is fucked.

I am glad my youngest is a Soph. Only 2.5 years or so and we are free from AISD BS. Hard to fault the district as recapture just completely fucks them. But at least Temple has a stadium with LED lights and a Jumbotron 

Posted

Mike Miles is given $173k raise, on top of his $470k base salary and a contract extension. So the taxation without representation continues.

I simply do not understand how this is allowed. If the voter vote for elected officials then they should be in office, if the state removes those folks, then they are effectively saying your vote doesn’t matter.

So if we vote for Abbott then those should not count as well because we are incapable of self governance. So we should also be incapable of paying taxes then as well.

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Posted
2 hours ago, CooterBrown said:

Strong rumor going around that Wooten Elementary will close and merge with Brentwood which puts that school over capacity.

I'm gonna guess our home elementary, Gullett, is gonna get fucked and merged with Pillow.

From the Zoom call, it sounds like the Beckett Elementary community already knows they're also closing.  

Wooten's elementary closing seems a strong possibility based on the data rubric.  I think the attendance zones would be modified for Brentwood to keep their capacity manageable.

 

Based on the data rubric, why do you think Gullet would be closed and merged with Pillow?

Posted
25 minutes ago, Michael Knight said:

Why Fascists Hate Critical Thinking

Randi Weingarten’s new book, Why Fascists Fear Teachers, reveals why Trump and the right demean teachers, slash school funding, and rewrite history

 

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/randi-weingarten-excerpt-fascists-hate-critical-thinking-1235428379/

 

it's their game plan ....

Immediately after seizing power in 1933, the Nazis passed the "Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service." This legislation provided the basis for dismissing teachers based on their political views (especially communists and social democrats) or their race.

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Posted

Why Fascists Hate Critical Thinking

Randi Weingarten’s new book, Why Fascists Fear Teachers, reveals why Trump and the right demean teachers, slash school funding, and rewrite history  
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/randi-weingarten-excerpt-fascists-hate-critical-thinking-1235428379/

No reviews so far, but I have some Audible credits that I need to burn, so I just started listening.
Posted
1 hour ago, swraith said:

Based on the data rubric, why do you think Gullet would be closed and merged with Pillow?

My first guess would be that Pillow & Wooten would merge since they're both under enrolled and really close to each other.  If you eliminate transfers, then Gullett & Brentwood fall within the ideal 85-95% capacity range.  It seems like easy fixes for 4 schools.  However, from the Dobie/Lamar meetings months ago, eastside activists were pretty insistent that white schools need to suffer.   Gullett hasn't received any real construction money and is in terrible condition.  Most classrooms are portables. They actually still use the very first portable AISD bought in the early '60s (the Speech portable). That is an extremely valuable piece of property and I would think developers have had discussions with them.  I fear for Lamar also. That has to be some valuable land at Burnet/2222.  Burnet and Dobie MS are right down the road.  If you split the higher performing Lamar students to those campuses, it can lift them out of their F ranking.  If students from the bad schools move, the F rating follows those students.  So, from a ratings perspective, it makes more sense to close a better performing school and disperse those students.

 

 

 

Posted

Lamar's attendance boundary is absolutely massive.  The eastern edge of its boundary map could be changed to release some of its zoned students to any combination of O'Henry, Kealing, Webb, and Martin.  That would bring down Lamar's over capacity issue.  Which is called out on rubric with "School zone is too crowded".  Lamar's cost per student in terms of Building & Operations is high and should be addressed longer term.  I just don't see a scenario where Lamar is closed, particularly given its status as Fine Arts Academy, unless AISD decides to do away completely with the academy concept.

 

I agree that "pain" is going to be distributed but I think that will come by major boundary zone changes, not by closing overcrowded schools on the west side.  Though the Bryker Woods parents seem to be in full force to save their school from perceived threats of closure.   Bryker Woods rubric score is identical to Gullett.  So maybe I'm just not reading the tea leaves correctly. 

Posted
19 hours ago, CooterBrown said:

It seems like many in Austin aren’t aware of the school consolidation plan that will announced Oct 3rd and voted on, on the 9th. A dozen or more elementary and middle schools will close and all attendance boundaries will be redrawn. AISD said in the Zoom call yesterday that every school will be affected and the boundary changes will be severe. They will also most likely eliminate transfers to force kids to attend their home schools.

Thanks for spreading the word, those that are affected need to know about this.

However, one small correction.  The plan is being uploaded in early October, meaning that it will be available online, probably via BoardDocs or on the school consolidation page.  The folks working on the plan will present it to the board at the board info session on Oct 9th.

The board is scheduled to vote on the final plan during their November 20th voting meeting.  So there is some time for tweaks, but I suspect the board has known the basic plan for a while.

You may have more recent info from the Zoom call than Austin ISD has published on their consolidation page.

They have to consolidate schools to remain financially viable.  They have burned through their savings and they are only able to reduce their deficit to where it is for this year by selling school properties for one-time cash.  The district said they have the same enrollment now as they did in the mid-1990s, but they are operating twenty more schools now than they did then.

The latest demographic report shows them losing 10% more of their students over the next ten years, then perhaps flatting out.

There are benefits to consolidation, although it's painful for folks to experience it and it's always unpopular.

Posted (edited)
1 hour ago, Texas Jeff said:

The latest demographic report shows them losing 10% more of their students over the next ten years, then perhaps flatting out.

One data point they threw out there was that when Minneapolis consolidated their schools, they lost 35% of their students.  Someone from AISD offhandedly mentioned an expectation of 10-15%.

The issue with the Zoom meetings is that 99% of the participants only give a shit about the wall-to-wall dual language schools. I honestly didn't even know that was a thing.  I wanted to just yell that shit won't even exist when TEA takes over so don't worry about it.

Edited by CooterBrown
Posted

Consolidation causes declining enrollment. Declining enrollment turbofucks the recapture formula. Round and round we go.

When considering closing east side schools you also have to map out the nearby charters. If you close a school that’s right next to one, your families will opt for the charter vs a school a lot farther away.

Posted
6 hours ago, CooterBrown said:

Bedichek, Martin, Brykerwoods, Wooten, Dawson, Becker, Maplewood, Ridgetop, and Joslin are the first schools on the chopping block to be leaked.

Bryker Woods is an interesting choice.  It is a small school in poor condition but the surrounding schools are mostly full or overcrowded according to the rubric they released.  Perhaps they are serious about limiting transfers to the West Austin elementaries, which might free up enough space to absorb the local population.

Maplewood will probably be merged into Campbell.  One of the trustees has mentioned this idea several times in board meetings.

Fun fact: Bedichek was a filming location for "Dazed and Confused".  IMHO, it looked old and out of date 30 years ago.

Posted

I missed this yesterday.  Nice to hear some alternate voices.  I don't know anything about the Interfaith Alliance.  Is this a fairly sane, mainstream group?

https://www.keranews.org/news/2025-09-17/interfaith-religious-freedom-schools-summit-texas

Quote

A coalition of interfaith groups is pushing back on what they say is a “Christian nationalist” school movement – and it’s starting in Texas.

The first ever Religious Freedom in Public Schools summit met in Dallas this week.

Drawing more than 150 people and numerous religious, civic and community organizations from 22 states, the summit was formed by Washington, D.C.-based non-profit Interfaith Alliance. Vice President Guthrie Grave-Fitzsimmons said it chose Texas for the first meeting because the state has already passed laws allowing chaplains as school counselors, sending public dollars to private and religious schools requiring classrooms to display the Ten Commandments in every class — which is facing a legal challenge — and allowing districts to set aside prayer time.

"For decades, we've had a consensus in our public schools that they should be open to people of all faiths and none, that the government should not indoctrinate students with one religion in our schools,” Graves-Fitzsimmons said. “And yet that consensus is breaking down because of a concentrated, coordinated push by far-right extremists to push one version of fundamentalist Christianity through our public school.”

 

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Posted
1 hour ago, fuggled said:

I missed this yesterday.  Nice to hear some alternate voices.  I don't know anything about the Interfaith Alliance.  Is this a fairly sane, mainstream group?

https://www.keranews.org/news/2025-09-17/interfaith-religious-freedom-schools-summit-texas

 

The first thing I think of when I hear about them is the work they did following 9/11 in trying to tamp down all the Islamophobia. Just a bunch of God-fearing, spiritual folks trying to keep us from all killing each other over spiritual matters. That's my impression of the group.

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